Business Networking – Visual Cues and How To Spot Them
Have you ever been so engrossed in what you’re telling someone that you failed to see that they weren’t listening? I have. Sometimes I’m even aware of it and I ignored it while continuing to talk my talk. Afterwards, I wondered why I wasted that 5 or 10 minutes when I could have been talking to someone willing to listen to me.
Now the key here is not to just be blabbing your sales pitch. As I’ve discussed in other articles, you must be attentive to the other person, ask questions, take notes if necessary and generally be interested in helping the other person. But let’s say you’ve done all that and now they ask you what you do? You begin talking and after a few minutes you notice that they are looking over your shoulder, or looking at the floor or the ceiling, or worse still, at your chest (you women know about this, right?). Perhaps they’re fidgeting. Maybe looking at their watch. Tapping their foot. Maybe they keep interrupting you.
Hey! These are CLUES!
So what does this mean? Well, it could mean that you are a boring talker. It could mean that they are rude and impatient. It could mean that you have a remarkable chest. (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) It could mean that they have a medical condition. The problem is, what do you do about it?
First, ask someone you can trust if you could improve your speaking skills. Quite possibly you could develop a standard “sales pitch” that doesn’t sound like your reading from a script. Make it interesting. Phrase it in such a way that it prompts questions from the other person. Second, if your speaking skills are good, perhaps you can just call the other person out and say something like, “Am I boring you?” Now that’s kind of harsh but sometimes a person needs to be made aware of how they’re acting. You could also say, “It really bothers me when you….” You could politely excuse yourself and just walk away from that person. If you’re in Texas you could pull out your concealed .38 and say, “You’re really making my day.” Or you could just signal the Networking Police and have them hauled away.
The point here is to be attentive to people you’re talking to. You may discover all kinds of things that will tell you what’s really going on with them and perhaps you can tailor your discussion to be more meaningful to them so that they will feel pleased and gratified that they talked to you. After all, that’s what networking’s all about – relationships. Hopefully the ones where people feel good about knowing you and not the ones where they’re looking down the barrel of a gun.
To your business success!
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